14 October 2018 12:40 AM

The British economy today resembles a clown on a unicycle, wobbling across Niagara Falls in a high wind on a tightrope, carrying a tottering burden of dead refrigerators, umbrellas, saucepans and budgerigar cages.

It is amazing that it does not tumble into the abyss, amid clattering noises and shouts of dismay. Each morning I wake up and the cashpoint machines are still working, I mutter my thanks that we have lasted a little longer.

I am not sure who I am thanking. I think it doesn’t crash because everyone who understands the position is quietly hoping that something will turn up to save it. But what if nothing turns up? Are we remotely ready to cope?

Her Majesty the Queen famously asked after the 2008 crash why nobody saw it coming. Almost anyone, even me, can see the next one coming.

The International Monetary Fund pointed out on Wednesday that Britain’s liabilities, from unpayable debts to gigantic public sector pension commitments, outweigh its assets by five trillion pounds to three trillion pounds.

That is to say, if they called in the bailiffs, and sold everything we have, we would still be two trillion pounds short.

This is partly because the British State has sold off so many of its assets already, so that your water supply is now owned by a foreign bank, and your privatised train is run by a foreign nationalised railway system. Presumably there’s some sense in this somewhere, though I can’t see what it is. At this rate, my local police force will end up being owned by the Kremlin and controlled by the GRU. And frankly, I’d be amazed if they do a worse job than the current management.

This sort of wild crisis level of debt can just about be tolerated in wartime, but I do not think we have suffered it in peacetime before. I don’t think it even includes the slopping ocean of private borrowing, which for most people is the only way they can afford the standard of living they were once used to, but now can’t afford on their shrinking pay. We are, in every way, a lot worse off than we were when the last crisis hit us in 2008.

But here’s one cause for comfort. The IMF praise us for at least being more honest than some countries about how bad things are. That’s nice. But it doesn’t really help.

My problem is that I can actually imagine it going wrong, all too easily. In 1990s Moscow, I saw repeated waves of catastrophe striking Russia’s middle classes, their savings wiped out, their welfare state, such as it was, shrivelling to nothing, their pensions evaporating. It was awful. People had to sell their belongings on the street to buy food.

But Russians are very tough, and they survived, as they still do, as ghosts of their former selves.

Let us hope it does not come to that, and the wobbling clown makes his way safely to the other side, against all the odds.

In the meantime, in between the crisis and the catastrophe, we may as well have a glass of champagne.

***

Haunted by the memory of the Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, who helped fake his own death in Kiev with the aid of the Ukrainian authorities and a lot of pig’s blood, I feel I must be cautious about the disappearance of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

It would be a great relief if Mr Khashoggi were to turn up alive and well, amid embarrassed explanations. But it is looking like an increasingly faint hope.

What should we in Britain make of this, if it turns out to be as bad as it looks? Sadly, we cannot say or do much. Even if we do eventually condemn the Saudis, we will do so with obvious reluctance, and will try as hard as we can to avoid a total breach. I’ll be more than surprised if we impose any serious sanctions.

This country has been living in the pocket of the Saudi despotism for decades. Our crazy policy in Syria, of supporting jihadis we would lock up if we found them in Birmingham, was adopted to please the Saudis. We are more or less silent about their police state repressions. We swallow our revulsion at the cruel little war they are conducting in Yemen, and side with them in their wild sectarian confrontation with Iran.

Our Royal Family is ceaselessly forced to pay court to the rulers of Riyadh. Flags in London fly at half-mast if a Saudi king dies. At least two recent British premiers have had to do obeisance to these tyrants as they were invested with some sort of ‘honour’.

David Cameron was awarded the Order of Abdulaziz al Saud in 2012 for ‘meritorious service to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’. Theresa May got hers in 2017.

I understand exactly why we do this. Britain is no longer a great and rich imperial power and must do undignified things to keep its citizens in work.

That is worth a few humiliations, and having to be polite to people you don’t really like.

Personally, I think we take it too far when we get involved in violent, futile and dangerous nonsenses like the Syrian war.

But, in any case, we need to tone down our moral bloviation when other countries misbehave. For some years now, the British Government has squawked about the undoubted wickedness of Russia. I have always said this outrage was phoney, because it is selective and is not aimed at lots of other countries we are afraid of, or owe money to.

Thanks to the Khashoggi incident, all kinds of other people who had never noticed this hypocrisy have now done so, and so it will have some effect. Well done, as always, for catching up. But remember, you read it here first – as usual.

***

Who cares if Doctor Who is a man or a woman? Anyone would think it was one of the ancient offices of state, like Archbishop of Canterbury (soon to be female) or Lord Chancellor (first woman appointed 2016). But Jodie Whittaker’s debut in the role was a heavy-handed expression of equality and diversity propaganda, a comprehensive school, post-Christian, multicultural mish-mash, so full of pious messages that it left no room for a decent plot. As far as I could work out, a large clove of garlic from another galaxy was trying to take over the world by stealing people’s teeth. There was a surprising number of violent deaths. I struggled to get to the end.

***

I am glad that the Supreme Court has issued a sensible ruling on the gay cake case in Northern Ireland. This political persecution of a Christian business was obviously unjustified from the start, and the lower courts which permitted it should be ashamed of themselves.

It was all about forcing someone to express an opinion he did not hold, by baking a cake supporting same-sex marriage. No free society could allow someone to be coerced into doing that. But how many people, in this fix, have the money or the determination to fight all the way to the top?

The default position on such things in this country is still repressive and intolerant, as anyone in the public sector, and especially in the state schools, knows very well.

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12 August 2018 12:04 AM

How we love fretting about the wrong thing. While the country convulses itself about Islamic face veils, a truly disturbing event, affecting our freedom and our future, goes almost unobserved.

This is the creepy and totalitarian treatment of a Christian nurse, Sarah Kuteh, sacked from an NHS hospital for daring to suggest that a patient she was treating might like to go to church and (horror of horrors) ‘inappropriately gave a Bible to a patient’.

The good news is that Ms Kuteh, pictured, whose abilities as a nurse have never once been questioned, has now been allowed back to work by the political commissars who increasingly control our country. But the price of this is a humiliating process of self- criticism, of the sort once usual in communist states.

Typically, the whole thing is conducted in a hideous mangled form of English which makes a supermarket checkout robot sound like Shakespeare.

To regain the favour of the commissars, she has had to write a ‘reflective’ screed in which she ‘incorporated your obligations in relation to having clear professional boundaries and not expressing your personal beliefs in an inappropriate way’ and ‘set out the steps you have taken to address the deficiencies highlighted in your practice. You have addressed how you would act differently in the future.’ In other words, she has confessed her thought-crime and promised not to repeat it.

Well, that is modern Britain, a slimy, squelchy totalitarian state in which unemployment, rather than the gulag, is used to threaten people into conformism and force them to keep their deepest, beloved beliefs a personal secret while they are on state premises.

How absurd. Christianity is pretty much the origin of modern nursing. I am glad my beloved Aunt Ena, a nurse of extraordinary courage and devotion, and an exemplary Christian in thought, word and deed, did not live to see this era.

But the cultural revolution has a special loathing for Christianity, perhaps precisely because it was until so recently the idea which ruled all our hearts.

And I doubt the same horrible process would have been imposed on a nurse who suggested her patients attended a mosque, or gave them a copy of the Koran. For while the British State loathes Christianity, it fears Islam. So do lots of other people.

It is this fear that has driven much of the stupid frenzy which followed Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson’s not especially funny or original remarks about niqabs, burkas and letterboxes.

Here’s a simple point about both these great religions. If you don’t believe in them, and to some extent even if you do, both faiths are a set of political and social opinions, chosen by those who hold them.

People are quite entitled to disagree with and mock them, as they would with any other manifesto and party. I’m against personal rudeness and deliberate offence, such as the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. But I’m all in favour of reasoned criticism, and some humour, and I’m weary of foolish people calling this ‘Islamophobia’ as if it was some sort of disease.

Being critical of Islam is not the same thing as the Judophobia which is such a big issue in the Labour Party. Judophobes dislike Jews for being who they unalterably are, not because of what they happen to think at the moment. For example, the Nazis murdered the distinguished German Christian theologian and Roman Catholic nun, Edith Stein, because she had Jewish ancestors. They went to some trouble to hunt her down in her Dutch convent and drag her to Auschwitz so they could kill her. That’s a phobia in action.

As it happens, I have quite a lot of sympathy with some bits of Islam. On a visit to Iran I was much impressed by a beautiful and highly intelligent young woman, a schoolteacher, who made out a powerful case for modesty in dress, and clearly had not been forced by her husband (very much her equal) into the night-black robes she wore.I’ve come across similar views in Turkey and Egypt. Forced veiling is another matter, but I cannot see that state bans or public jeering are going to make much difference to that.

We have Muslim fellow-citizens among us, for good or ill. They are our neighbours. We’re going to have to work out a civilised relationship, in which we can talk frankly to each other. I’ve never found any of them upset by serious argument. Many are saddened by much of what they see around them. So am I. Many wish this country was more Christian. So do I.

One of the supreme achievements of a free civilisation is the ability to disagree without hating your opponent. We need to relearn it.

***

Watch out for the true menace

Amid our exaggerated fear and loathing of Russia, we are strangely uninterested in the dangerous despotism of China, which does not just flatten free speech on its own territory, but seeks to do so here.

A notable critic of Peking’s behaviour in Hong Kong, Benedict Rogers, has been the victim of an extraordinary personal attack which must, in my view, have come directly from the Chinese state.

His Surrey neighbours (the entire street) have been sent anonymous letters telling lies about him and denouncing him, trying to soften the impact with fake humour. They include a photograph of him and the words ‘Watch him’. The nameless correspondent has even sent a letter to Mr Rogers’s mother, in rural Dorset (how did they find her?) saying: ‘We, as a Chinese race… care not to be lectured, watched or bullied by your son.’

One man, bullying a superpower? I have also heard of Chinese attempts to put pressure on British student societies which have dared to host critics of their regime. It is not enough to silence dissent at home. They want to do it here, too. Watch them.

***

A mission with an alarming twist...

I confess I do quite enjoy the Mission: Impossible films, mainly because the chase scenes provide such wonderful, unexpected views of great and beautiful cities.

I can’t ever really understand what is going on, and it worries me that hardly anyone ever gets time to eat anything. But in the latest, the makers seem to have developed some sort of conscience, in which you can’t sacrifice an individual (even one of your own paid agents) for the greater good.

If this goes on, the baddies are going to start winning.

***

As idiots and greedy lobbyists continue their well-funded, cynical campaign for legal marijuana, the evidence that this would be crazy still mounts. We now have the confession of the Parkland High shooter Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 people at the Florida school last February. And lo, like almost every other rampage killer everywhere from Nice to Arizona for the past several years, he turns out to be a heavy user of marijuana. Don’t listen to the Big Dope Lobby. Just like Big Tobacco, they’re happy for others to die if they get rich.

***

I have been banned (I expect for life) from editing the online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia. My sin was to make a joke. This outfit turns out to be run by an anonymous, cut-rate version of the Spanish Inquisition, only without the sense of humour. I’d say it’s reasonably reliable on subjects such as trees and warships. But not about anything controversial.

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06 August 2018 3:46 PM

I still think Wikipedia is, on balance, a good thing. This is even though its mysterious ruling council of Wikicrats have now banned me from taking any part in editing it. It is despite the fact that the said Wikicrats then gagged and muzzled me, when I said that this action should not be taken until after a fair trial, rather than before any kind of trial.

It is a bit like the aftermath of an unpleasant dream. In the world of Wikipedia I have been arrested, penalised and silenced without trial, denied any freedom to defend myself before any independent or unprejudiced tribunal, and told I can only have my freedom back if I publicly abase myself before the arbitrary authorities. Actually, ahem, I’m not guilty until I have been ruled to be so by a unanimous independent jury of my peers, and if they treat me as guilty without due process, they can take a flying leap. So they can whistle for the grovel they want, till the end of time. There is only ever one answer to such Kangaroo Tribunals. So Goodbye Wikipedia, at least from the editing point of view But it is a mild taste of what it must be like, in reality, to face obdurate authority of this kind, nasty and dispiriting. It dims the sunshine, and nags at the mind.

Of course, not being able to contribute to areas of knowledge where you have expertise is annoying. But fall foul of the strange, nameless elite which actually runs Wikipedia, and it is like Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ without the jokes. My Kangaroo Trial grinds on, and I confidently expect shortly to be banned from Wikipedia until I kowtow to them, which means ( see above) for the rest of my life.

Is this a great loss? It is a loss, for certain. Most of you will probably never have bothered, but some years ago I thought it would be interesting and rewarding to sign up as what Wikipedia rather grandly calls an ‘editor’. You can easily create an identity and a sign-on – mine is ‘Clockback’, as in ‘Putting the Clock Back’ and is meant to be a mild self-depreciating joke, though few people get it. When, like me, you have no sense of humour, it is hard to work out what might amuse other people.

The first thing I learned from this is that any Wikipedia entry about any live issue which is even mildly controversial cannot be trusted. It is at best a useful starting point from which to find research sources, but often not even that. I made the mistake of challenging the consensus view on one or two such subjects, and introducing into their entries mentions of controversies which they did not refer to. Within minutes, my changes had been wiped out by militant guardians, who plainly had more numbers and more time on their side than I could ever hope to do. Had I had a hundred allies, all with limitless time, it might have been possible to change things. Otherwise not. This sort of intimidation works, and is diligently done by propagandists, because Wikipedia is still taken more seriously than it should be by innocent readers.

Oddly, you can face the same problem in what appear to be wholly uncontentious areas. I once attempted to add a short reference to what I thought of as an important book, which had not been given much space, on the Wikipedia page about a favourite author. Again, my change was wiped out within minutes by a furious guardian, who seemed to think that she, and nobody else, should control the entry. Life’s too short to qyarrel with people like this.

My one significant success has been to alter the Wikipedia entry for the ‘Education Policy Institute’ so that the alert reader will realise that this body is not a wholly disinterested research organisation, but has deep connections with the Liberal Democrat party, and with the ‘Academy’ movement.

Because I can see that some people might be worried by this fact, and are entitled to know what I am up to, I have also made clear from the start that I am Peter Hitchens, yes, that one, and even went through a strange procedure to confirm this. Had I not done so, and had I instead hidden my identity, perhaps I would have been spared the events of the past week. So much for honesty being the best policy.

I thought this was especially important, as I have sometimes made changes in the entry about me and the one about my late brother and in a few others where I have an openly-declared interest. In the family ones, I have kept myself pretty strictly to correcting factual errors, which in some cases nobody else could possibly do. Who else knows when I joined and left the International Socialists? Who else would be troubled by, and put right, a foolish mistake about my late father’s naval career? Who else recalls the day I broke into a government fall-out shelter in Cambridge, more than 50 years ago? But then again, why let a silly mistake survive, where it might be believed, cited and repeated? One day it could just be important.

These rules it seems to me, were decided on the assumption that the male sex is predatory and untrustworthy.

Likewise, Wikipedia’s rules seem designed to deal with people who, offered the opportunity to wield secret influence in their favour, will do so. They also assume that those editors involved entirely lack the normal human emotions, such as grouchiness, and are never impatient, let alone sarcastic or satirical. Actually, let me qualify this. You can do these things if you’re more or less on the side of conventional wisdom and don’t work for the Mail on Sunday. My opponent on the Bishop George Bell’ entry (the source of all my troubles) is extraordinarily rude without provocation, calling me a ‘loudmouth’, describing my articles as ‘rants’, dismissing the highly distinguished, disinterested and multi-party group of people who seek basic due process for the late Bishop Bell as a ‘fan club’ and claiming wrongly that they are ‘right-wing’ in the clear belief that this would be a bad thing if so, (so simultaneously disclosing his own partiality and his ignorance of the subject). Nothing whatever happens to him for this behaviour. Indeed, he has a ‘Platinum medal’ for his services to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia’s rules were made to prevent secret distortion and lying, and manipulation, not to prevent someone like me openly and transparently correcting errors, even if I do sometimes shout and stamp a bit, to get attention.

In this openness, I am highly unusual. Pseudonyms are actively encouraged on Wikipedia, for reasons I can guess at but don’t really understand. Most Wikipedia ‘editors’ have names like ‘Woof’ or ‘3ZjY8Splat!’ . And the people who have adopted these interplanetary names also understand Wikipedia’s cobwebbed maze of rules (like an arcane board game invented by someone who enjoys algebra) about how exactly to appeal and who to appeal to in case of difficulty. I confess I never have done. Sometimes I have been able to hunt help down, using parts of the keyboard I had never even noticed before. What *is* a ‘tylde’? (It’s all right, I know now). Sometimes, a week later, trying to repeat the feat, I have lost my way doing so, and ended up going round in electronic circles. You try, if you think it is either easy, or easy to learn.

As so often, in computer world, those who *are* skilled in it completely fail to understand how baffling it is for those who are not. In my experience the best way to get help is to make a small but definite noise, at which point a helpful person often descends from the sky and fixes the problem.

I agree this is not ideal, but nobody ever gets hurt and no lies get told in this process, whereas problems often do get fixed.

The really funny bit is that, on this occasion, I finally did discover which button to press, and appealed for help from an ‘administrator’, who immediately descended from on high, studied the issue in depth for what must have been all of 90 seconds, and thereupon blocked me indefinitely from the whole Wikipedia site (except from my own small talk page, from which I have also now been banned as well, for refusing to kowtow).

I appealed about this: ‘I am in dispute with another editor who repeatedly reverts legitimate changes in the entry and will not engage in discussion’

This administrator ruled ‘I have blocked Clockback based on a review of contributions, which skew heavily towards highly biased

Very quickly, the fact that I am a newspaper columnist (and not for ‘The Guardian’) entered into the discussion.

To which my blocker responded : ‘Should have guessed. If only his brother were here instead.’

I have a record of the whole exchange, in which the significance of my connection with the MoS is explored at length, but it is pretty dull, and I have edited it severely to remove identifiers.

After that, my entire Wikipedia record, stretching back more than ten years, was combed for offences against the rules. The Wikigulag looms.

Today I sneaked a final defence on to the trial page, where it remained for all of ten seconds before being wiped. It ran as follows: ‘Hullo everybody, this is Peter Hitchens (in real life!), not logged in as Clockback as I would then be censored and muzzled. Administrators have my e-mail address, thanks to the appeals they have rejected on it, and are invited to contact me if they wish to check the authenticity and provenance of this contribution. I would just like to ask all those involved in this decision to take a long, slow breath and look at what they have done. Most fundamentally, they have responded to a plea for help with a kick in the teeth. When I posted a request for assistance in a dispute with another editor, which had lasted two years and involved the other editor being unpleasantly rude, openly biased on the issue under discussion, and unresponsive on the talk page, on several occasions, the person who intervened (who could not possibly, in the time, have made a just or thorough examination of the matter) immediately blocked me, and to rub the matter in, blocked me indefinitely. This is plainly unjust and no free person would accept it or be willing to abase himself to get it lifted. If you wish to discuss this matter with me, treat me fairly. If (as seems to be the case in some comments) you take a special pleasure in blocking a Mail on Sunday columnist, feel free. If that is your idea of a good time, then I can only say that we're all different. But do not pretend you are doing this in pursuit of the truth. The fact remains that my much-frowned-on edits, though satirical and not intended to stand (I made their purpose plain on the talk page), were entirely factual, an undeniable truth which I have yet to get any administrator or editor to notice, acknowledge or address. Fact One: The police, in England, have precisely no statutory role in the investigation of crimes allegedly committed by the dead; Fact Two: it is a legal absurdity for any English tribunal to say it has found no reason to doubt an allegation. Reason to doubt is actively embodied in the principle of presumption of innocence, is the basis of jury trial and is embedded in both civil and criminal procedure. If you are ready to listen, then I'm ready to defend myself. If I am treated with fairness, an open mind and civility, you will find I respond in the same way. If I am muzzled and silenced, then I just remember how my English ancestors would have responded to such treatment. Please do not delete this. I have of course kept a copy.’

And now we come to the issue itself, which I must now leave it to others to sort out. I should at this stage point out that some editors and administrators on Wikipedia have nobly come to my defence. I am very grateful to them but they have been met with quite a lot of derision and hostility for simply abiding by the laws of fairness. Some - but not all of them - believe I should have ‘helped myself’ by grovelling, but I cannot pretend to believe that I have done anything wrong.

The dispute is about the description of controversy about the late Bishop George Bell. My view is this. whatever anyone may have believed about this in the past (and the C of E made great efforts to persuade people that they had serious evidence against Bishop Bell when they did not), the charges were dealt a devastating blow (the lovely old English word ‘Whirret’ seems right in the circumstances) by the report of Lord Carlile QC, which you may read in full here.

Amazingly, until I put it there last week, the Wikipedia entry on the George Bell case did not even contain a direct link to this report.

Now, Lord Carlile was specifically debarred from giving any opinion on the charges against George Bell in his conclusions. Archbishop Welby put that in the terms of reference.

But that did not stop him giving an opinion elsewhere in the document. And lo:

Paragraph 171: 'Had the evidence my review has obtained without any particular difficulty (see section[H] below) been available to the Church and the CPS, I doubt that the test for a prosecution would have been passed. Had a prosecution been brought on the basis of that evidence, founded upon my experience and observations I judge the prospect of a successful prosecution as low. I would have expected experienced criminal counsel to have advised accordingly.’

Lord Carlile must be one of the most experienced lawyers of his generation. Coming from him, this judgement is quite devastating, and only people who don't understand English legal understatement could miss its import. I have known this since Christmas and waited for other Wikipedia editors, unburdened by being me, to discover it and include it, because I am aware of preposterous prejudices against anyone with knowledge of the matter, daring to tinker with the sacred Wikipedia.

Yet the Wikipedia version, while giving a wholly inadequate account of the Carlile Report, *still* contains tendentious rubbish, dating from the C of E’s original slippery attempt to smear Bishop Bell in the eyes of public and media, driven by the fact that it wasn’t anything like as sure of his guilt as it was claiming to be.

Most especially is the redundant, outdated, and discredited section about how the police had said they had enough evidence to arrest George Bell, had he not been dead for some decades. To my own direct and painful personal knowledge, this inaccurate claim poisoned the minds of many people, often highly educated ones, especially in the media, against George Bell. It created a great solidified wall of slime, which had to be cleared out of the way before the case could be properly debated. It should never have been said. Now that it is discredited, it has no place in a tightly-edited and concise account of the case *unless* it is qualified by a strong rebuttal. The questionable, indeed legally needless and ultra vires, involvement of the police should certainly not be the opening stage of the story.

This claim that Bell would have been arrested was clearly stated by Carlile to be wrong in law in his paragraph 167, which everyone interested in the case should read to the end, especially the bit about the C of E taking ‘ an exaggerated view’ of the use of the word ‘arrest’

The police have also admitted to me, in their formal response to a complaint I made to them on behalf of GB’s niece, that the C of E diocese persuaded them to get involved. Detective Superintendent J.D. Graves wrote :

‘… the Diocese of Chichester notified Sussex Police that they planned to release a statement to the media. It was never our intention to be proactive (my emphasis); in other words, there was no intention to release a police statement about the alleged criminality of Bishop Bell (my emphasis). However, we were asked by the Diocese to make a statement as they had decided to make this information public and so we provided them with a statement for inclusion in their press release on the basis that once the Diocese published their statement a natural consequence would be a media request to the police for comment’.

It later repeats ‘the press release was driven by the Diocese’.

This was an extraordinary admission, though of course one that could have been foreseen by any informed person, since the Police in England have absolutely no statutory role in the investigation of criminal allegations against the dead, who cannot, in English law, be prosecuted. Anyway, since ‘Carol’ first made her claim in 1995 (as Carlile records) her concern has always been to make a civil claim against the C of E, not a criminal charge against Bishop Bell.

As for the stuff about some secret tribunal ‘finding no reason’ to doubt the claims against George bell, that was just a confession of legal incompetence. The presumption of innocence is always a reason to doubt any charge. And there was a good deal more, as any reader of the long paragraph 178 shows.

That’s what it was all about. But at the end of it, the Wikipedia account is still hopelessly biased against the truth. Perhaps someone else unburdened by being me, is prepared to become as knowledgeable as I am about the case, and set the matter right. If they do, I warn them not to make any jokes.

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14 May 2018 4:41 PM

I thought it was time to write a small article in defence of ‘Whataboutery’, also known as ‘Whataboutism’ or ‘Tu Quoque’ (Thou also [dost this thing]’)

I am surprised by how easily some people are persuaded that a point is wrong when it is dismissed as ‘Whataboutism’. Why, when the person making the case is claiming a moral fault, is it not legitimate to point out that he himself has the same fault?

The Bible is pretty clear on this.

IN The Gospel according to St Matthew Chapter 7, vv 3-5, Our Lord says : ‘And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? ‘Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.’

The same metaphor appears in almost identical words in the Gospel according to St Luke, vv 41-2 . It seems odd, when moralising in a society whose morals are supposed to be Christian (indeed, on what other basis can we approve or disapprove of any action?), to classify the preaching of Jesus Christ as either a fallacy or as ‘whataboutery’.

The term ‘whataboutism’ seems to have first appeared in the Cold War, when the USSR might point to the American treatment of the black minority there, when attacked for being a police state with labour camps.

But this was feeble. The two things are not the same. Certainly the USA is very far from being a perfect society, and its treatment of African-Americans has been ( and to some extent remains) highly unsatisfactory.

But this simply wasn’t comparable with the USSR’s system of censorship, repression and political trials. What’s more, anyone who knows anything about Russia knows that ethnic bigotry is very common in Russia, generally directed against the nearest available targets, Central Asians, Chechens and peoples from beyond the Caucasus, but liberally applied to anyone with a dark skin from any part of the planet.

The Soviet propaganda was more effective when it responded to complaints of Soviet repression in the satellite states of eastern Europe by noting that the USA did not readily tolerate governments hostile to it in Latin America. But there were differences even here. In fact, since the days of the Marsahll Plan in the 1940s, a fundamentally free-market and politically conservative USA had often allied with social democratic governments in Western Europe, despite not liking their internal policies very much. The USSR, except in its very late stages when it tolerated Hungary’s semi-capitalist ‘goulash communism’, demanded Communist Party rule in theory and practice.

In general the USR’s propaganda, and the arguments of its apologists in the West, could rightly be dismissed as ‘false equivalence of opposites’. There were similarities between the superpowers, but they were trivial, whereas there were differences, and they were fundamental.

So now let us turn to the new bout of alleged ‘Whataboutery’. I am myself struck by the profound similarities between Russian intervention in Syria, and Russia’s use of airpower against Islamist urban guerrillas in Aleppo, and Western intervention in Iraq and the sue of western airpower against Islamist urban guerrillas in Mosul.

I pointed this out a couple of years ago, in conversation with Christina Lamb, on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show. Ms Lamb scoffed, but I have never bene able to see why she did. The main difference between the two events is not material. In both cases the Islamists were using the population as hostages in dense built-up areas; in both cases the major outside powers eventually sued heavyweight airpower to crush them, with substantial civilian casualties. Nobody disputes that these attacks happened, or that innocent people died in them. But, as I’ve pointed out here, the quantity and tone of the reports on Aleppo have been quite different from those of the reports on Mosul.

But in Russia’s case, media, ‘NGOs’ and diplomats accused Russian forces of deliberately targeting civilians, hospitals, etc (I have seen zero proof of this deliberate targeting, for which you would need access to the orders given to the pilots, it seems to me) . No such charges (quite rightly) were made against US British or other coalition air forces.

This isn’t false equivalence of opposites. This is false opposition of equivalents.

I mention this by way of introduction to three points I wish to make about today. The first is the story of Abdel Hakim Belhaj (or Belhadj, if you prefer, I don’t mind). Britain now admits helping in an operation in which this man was kidnapped by the CIA , along with his wife, held in a secret prison before being flown in chains to Libya, where the Gaddafi state was free to torture him at will in its disgusting dungeons.

The Guardian reported that our Prime Minister, Theresa May ‘admitted the UK should have done more to reduce the risk that the couple could be mistreated and had wrongly missed opportunities to help them once they were held in the prisons of the then Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi.

‘The Prime Minister acknowledged that Britain should have realised sooner that its international allies were involved in unacceptable practices, implying criticism of Libya for torturing suspects as well as the CIA's practice of rendition.’

This is so naïve it makes Pollyanna look like Machiavelli, and would be rather sweet if it didn’t involve people being chained up, starved, hooded, wrapped in duct tape, kidnapped by operatives of the Land of the Free and crammed into secret jails, and then loaded on to unmarked aircraft for a trip to one of the world’s worst tyrannies.

There’s a little side-bar to it, as well, which I find intensely moving. I don’t have much time for John McCain in general, though (like any sentient being) I have always felt that he conducted himself with extreme courage and dignity during his nightmare captivity in North Vietnam.

Now Senator McCain is very ill and close to death. The Guardian notes : ‘This is a very live issue indeed. In Washington, Gina Haspel is currently having her confirmation hearings as Donald Trump's new CIA director. From 2002, Ms Haspel ran the secret CIA centre in Thailand where inmates were tortured and where Ms Boudchar [Belhaj’s wife, pregnant at the itme of her state-sponsored kidnap] was mistreated. Mr Trump supports torture. He wants to bring back waterboarding. John McCain, the only US senator to have actually been tortured, is fighting Ms Haspel's nomination on that basis.’

A White House aide has sneeringly remarked that Senator McCain is ‘dying anyway’ . And it looks as if PresidentTrump won’t be welcome at Senator McCain’s funeral

So this is the civilised West at work, and with that a background, a certain Andrew Parker, Director-General of the British Security Service( known to many as MI5) has made a pious speech in Berlin.

Let ,me get something straight here. Aided by the TV series ‘Spooks’, the BSS has got itself a glamorous toughie reputation, and many people refer to it as a spy service. It is not. It has no espionage duties.

In fact the only accurate generic name for such an organisation, especially given the huge budgets, status and immunity form scrutiny which it enjoys these days, is that it is a form of Secret Police agency . True, it so far lacks powers of arrest. But, following the granting of such powers to civil servants (a major breach of an ancient rule) in the ‘National Crime Agency’, it cannot be long before this line is crossed.

As usual when the principles of English liberty are being raped or tossed lightly aside, few realise the significance of the granting of powers of arrest to civil servants. Civil servants are under the direct authority of government, and of ministers.

Police officers are not and have never been civil servants. They are sworn constables, whose duty is to *the law*, which they have sworn an oath to uphold without fear or favour, and not to the state itself. This position gives them the freedom, and indeed the duty, to refuse an unlawful order from a technical superior. Their local nature also helps them to resist central government pressure ( though they are nothing like as local as they should be, or as they were before the Jenkins-imposed mergers of 1967) - though the Ministry of Defence Police, the British Nuclear Police and the British Transport Police are national bodies perhaps more subject to Whitehall than they should be.

My own nightmare is the Civil Contingencies Act of 2004 (read it some time), an emergency powers law so extensive that the government of the day can, if it wishes, turn this country into a sort of dictatorship in a matter of hours. So forgive me if I am not a great enthusiast for MI5. And forgive me if I am sceptical about its frequent, uncheckable claims to have thwarted terror plots. If I had a budget that big, was treated with similar reverence as that accorded to MI5, and was that well-screened from scrutiny, I too might be inclined to make boasts about how good I was at my job. Who could gainsay me? But now Mr Parker has gone to Berlin to make a well-trailed speech (front page of the semi-official newspaper ‘The Times’ and all over the BBC this morning), warning Russia that its behaviour, notably over the Skripals, might make it even more of a pariah.

Well, no doubt, but I am tempted to say ‘What about the Belhaj case (and what about the Trump administration’s view of torture and its chosen candidate to head the CIA?). It doesn’t seem to me that a muted apology in the Commons and a cheque for Mr Belhaj’s wronged wife really suggest that we have cleaned out the stables. Does that not make Britain and the USA pariahs too, and if not, why not?

And then let us note the arrival in London of Mr Recep Tayip Erdogan, President of Turkey, whose sinister nature has many times been discussed in this blog, and whose rapidly darkening country I have twice visited to document this. Mr Erdogan has in recent months turned what was a fairly free and law-governed country into a despotism. The prisons are full of journalists. The courts are lawless instruments of state power. Independent newspapers and broadcasters have been terrified into submission. Mr Erdogan is gathering all the power in Turkey into his person, and creating an executive presidency at least as menacing to a free society as Vladimir Putin’s.

His foreign policy is also highly dangerous, and is causing grave friction in Syria. Oh, and Turkey still occupies North Cyprus, which it invaded in July 1974 in an action which is an extraordinarily close diplomatic and political parallel to Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea in 2014.

Yet Mr Erdogan is not called a pariah, and is to be welcomed at Downing Street and given tea with the Queen (as well as offered excellent deals on military equipment), photo opportunities and developments which will help him , in a rapidly approaching election, to consolidate his despotic power.

So, Mr Parker, What About That? What about Mr Belhaj? And What About Mr Erdogan? Is your wrath at Russia genuine? If it is, why do you not feel it for those who took part in the sordid kidnapping and rendition of Mr Belhaj, and who defend or excuse torture as an instrument of the state? And why do you not make speeches in Berlin (or come to that in Birmingham or Basildon), attacking Turkey?

13 May 2018 7:28 PM

Typical Russians, eh? They kidnap a man and his pregnant wife in broad daylight, then hide them in a secret prison in an Asian airport where they wield sinister influence.

There they begin to torture him. Despite the fact that she is obviously pregnant, they chain her to a wall and put a hood over her head, for five days.

Next, they swathe her from head to toe in duct tape (in agony, because one of her eyes is taped open) and fly them both to Syria so he can be tortured more thoroughly for several years.

With the two chained and bound prisoners comes a delivery note from the Russian spy chief to his Syrian opposite number: ‘This is the least we could do for you, to demonstrate our remarkable relationship’.

This is the sort of disgusting behaviour we have come to expect from the Kremlin. Except that I have changed the details. This story is not about the Kremlin. It is about the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and our allies in the American CIA. And the man we helped kidnap, Abdel Belhaj was not sent to Syria, but to Libya, whose then despot we were courting.

All the details of this unspeakable, lawless operation are known, and cannot be denied. They came out into the open only because a group of militiamen happened to stumble on the papers in an abandoned office in Tripoli.

The government has admitted their truth by apologising for them, and writing a large cheque (with your hard-earned money, of course) to Mr Belhaj’s wife, Fatima Boudchar. Nobody is even trying to deny them, though the Labour Government ministers in charge at the time (2004) seem to be having some trouble remembering the episode.

There are plenty of things you can think about this, including whether those involved, politicians and civil servants alike, ought to face some kind of justice. I would not hold out many hopes.

My point is this. So much of our current frenzy against Russia and Syria is based on a claim of moral superiority. Do we have any such superiority if we kidnap people and send them to tyrants to be tortured? So shoudn’t we stop pretending that our hostility to Russia and Syria has a moral purpose – and explain what, in that case, our motive really is?

Or are we embarrassed that our motive is almost as sordid as the miserable Belhaj episode?

Certainly since before the 2003 Iraq invasion, which members of the current government mostly supported, this country has been implicated in the most horrible actions, many of which will probably remain secret forever.

Strangely, many of these kidnaps and much of this complicity in unspeakable tortures was justified by our moral fury against Al Qaeda, a movement with whom we now co-operate in Syria.

It is also quite possible to argue (and I do) that the Iraq invasion was the gravest political mistake of our age, closely followed by David Cameron’s attack on Libya.

We are now hurrying towards serious war in the Middle East, lashed to the strange, seemingly unhinged figure of Donald Trump, whose vain, pouting, writhing performance on Tuesday night was one of the most frightening things I have ever seen in my life. Could it possibly have been plainer that he views us not as allies but as minions?

And why shouldn’t he, if we collaborate with the CIA in actions like these?

A proper British government would cease this sort of co-operation, whatever little treats and pats on the head we may be offered in return for it. And a proper British government should also stand aside from war policies in the Middle East which will only lead to still more terror, torture and pain.

*********

Talking of war, and Syria, many of you may have noticed frequent references in the media to a body called the ‘Syrian Observatory for Human Rights’, often quoted as if it is an impartial source of information about that complicated conflict, in which the British government clearly takes sides. The ‘Observatory’ says on its website that it is ‘not associated or linked to any political body.’

To which I reply: Is Boris Johnson’s Foreign Office not a political body? Because the FO just confirmed to me that ‘the UK funded a project worth £194,769.60 to provide the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights with communications equipment and cameras.’ That’s quite a lot, isn’t it? I love the precision of that 60p. Your taxes, impartially, at work.

********

Rosamund Pike is one of the cleverest and wittiest actresses of our time, as she showed in the wonderful ‘An Education’. And it is interesting to see the 1970s, that lost decade, so meticulously recreated. But I am not quite sure about the OK, but flawed new film about the 1976 Entebbe hijack.

The great thing about Entebbe was that the bravery and skill of the Israeli commandos meant almost all the hostages were saved, and the terrorists were killed. This was a distinct turn for the better in an era when hijackers far too often got away with their crimes.

Nobody wept, or wondered if this had been the right thing to do. These disgusting people, Germans among them, had actually separated the Jewish passengers from the others. They were bad enough before they did that. After they did it, they had passed into a zone of evil from which there can be no return.

But there is something dangerously soppy about the film’s attitude towards the hijackers. Sure, they were human. That is precisely why their actions deserved to be ended and punished with violent death. Because they knew better. The film’s apparent belief that negotiation, even with such people, is a good thing is simply untrue.

It is precisely because we have talked to and rewarded so many terrorists, from the PLO to the IRA, that terrorism continues to flourish. If all terrorists died as the Entebbe criminals died, there would be a lot less terror.

******

The President of Peking University (yes, despite our feeble Cultural Kowtow of saying ‘Beijing’ they still call it that) says students should not be encouraged to question or to think critically because it ‘hinders steps for the future’.

He should obviously come here instead, as so many British students (and professors) are frightened out of their wits by any departure from orthodoxy, he’d fit in very well.

******

Why do feminists make fusses about nothing – such as the current persecution of a man in a lift who asked, jokingly, for someone to press the button for the ladies’ lingerie floor? It is because they long ago achieved their aims, but admitting it would mean they’d have to find something else to do.

Don’t take my word for it. The playwright David Edgar recounts this week that as far back as the 1970s a feminist manual written by the militant Anna Coote ‘had to be quickly revised because so many of its demands had been won’. In fact the left won almost everything it wanted years ago. That is why we are in such a mess.

*****

A tiny gleam of light in the endless, swirling, flatulent fog of the European debate: The possibility that Britain may remain inthe European Economic Area, so getting rid of three quarters of the EU’s laws, while not madly damaging its trade with EU countries, is still just about alive. One day, people will realise what a good idea this is.

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23 November 2017 3:53 PM

Everyone pretends to have read George Orwell’s great warning against totalitarianism ‘ Nineteen Eighty Four’, but few, I find, have done so. They look blank when I refer to important passages in it.

But here is a short excerpt from the film of the book, in which Richard Burton plays the Inner Party apparatchik O’Brien, who first tricks the hero, Winston Smith (played by John Hurt) , into joining the resistance, and then tortures him into submission to the Party. Please watch it:

The point is this. The total state is not content with passive obedience. In the end it isn’t even happy with public, insincere subjection. It wants active submission. In this it is like the mediaeval horrors of the Inquisition, where even those who gave in and pronounced the necessary words were treated with suspicion.

In Orwell’s much cruder world, such things were normally obtained by imprisonment, torture and threats of death. Some more backward states still use these methods, presumably because they are as stupid as they are malign. Do they really need to?

In our marshmallow totalitarianism, the threat is usually much softer – the dissenter’s job and standing are threatened, and if he does not give in, his livelihood and his reputation are taken away. Instead of the torture machine and Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, the Twitter Mob, howling with execration, incessant and relentless, frightens most bodies into sacrificing the necessary victim. It seems to work. The chosen individual suffers, but everyone else soon gets used to it.

Most people don’t have very strong convictions about anything, so they never get close to these threats, and just adapt. I am endlessly amused by the behaviour of politicians and mainstream media persons, presenters of TV and radio shows etc, who have seamlessly shifted their received opinions in the last 30 years, and swallow things as normal which in the 1980s they would have regarded as stark staring mad.

This does not describe me. I have been going in the opposite direction, inconveniently.

I more or less bought the whole package of sexual revolution in my teens and early twenties, which coincided with the High Sixties, as I now think the 1967-73 era should be called. In the years afterwards I slowly came to regret, and then to criticise and reject many, though not all, of the sexual and social revolution’s positions. I did this on reasoned grounds. But I couldn’t help noticing that almost all around me were gradually coming round to positions I now found worrying and dubious. Oh well.

But for me it’s a matter of reason. I can’t approach it in any other way. I can’t despise people who now advance positions I used (more or less) to share. I can’t be shocked or angered by them either. I've seen them before, or things very like them. In fact I suspect that many who are now shocked and angered by, say, the Transgender issue, will eventually come round to accepting the new gospel. I am pretty sure this was the case with same-sex marriage. Those who 15 years ago were utterly appalled by it have now reconciled themselves to it and will in time forget they were ever against it. My own view on the Transgender issue, following some investigations many years ago, is that there are beyond doubt some individuals who are greatly troubled about this, and it’s not for us to intrude into or mock their private concerns. But this does not (for instance) provide a blanket justification for abandoning any caution in responding to the worries of adolescents about this. It’s a bit wishy-washy, but I really cannot see how it can be anything else.

Reason and fact are the only things that can be deployed here. Nothing else will last or increase the sum of knowledge. Despite some feeble attempts to label me ‘Transphobic’ or to draw me into a wider debate on the subject which I prefer to avoid, I believe I have said virtually nothing about the Transgender issue *as such* at all.

As I explained earlier this week(I’m sorry, I’ve had two major out-of-town speaking engagements this week and have been away from my desk more than usual) I made a deliberate decision last weekend to criticise the treatment of the teacher Joshua Sutcliffe, who has been disciplined for calling a school student self-identifying as male a ‘girl’.

suggests the alleged offence against the Transgender Code was repeated. I have seen no other account which suggests this. Can anyone help me here?

I am in fact rather intrigued by the fact that the left-wing press has made so little mention of the case. I can find no mention of it in the Guardian or the Observer, for instance. Could this be because they have looked into it and it does not, in fact, suit their beliefs?

I don’t think it does. I’ve never met Mr Sutcliffe and suspect (from the TV clips of him being interviewed which I have seen) that I wouldn’t especially like him if I did. But the heart of the case is quite simple. Not only does the whole case arise from what sounds very much as if it was a genuine mistake. He had never intended to call the student a girl. But also, there would be no complaint if the modern ideology did not insist that the student’s subjective idea of that student’s sex (which is also the school’s subjective belief on the matter) must override any of the normal objective means of making such judgements.

If this is not the case, then why is the teacher being taken through a disciplinary procedure? It is the modern ideological state which is doing this, and which has made an issue out of it. Mr Sutcliffe tried pretty hard to adapt to this new world by the use of tact and good manners. But his desire to show such consideration went only one way. The other side were quite unforgiving. I stick to my point. Freedom of speech and thought - and objective truth itself – are in danger here, from instinctive totalitarians who know they are right and good and (for all the sticky softness of their methods) ae hard as nails.

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19 November 2017 12:03 AM

Most of these politically correct fads are just designed to wind us up and provoke us. For example, I now regret having wasted so much time trying to argue rationally about same-sex marriage. All the sexual revolutionaries wanted was an excuse to call me a bigot. They could then ignore everything I said, or tell lies about me, or both.

It was a tiny issue. In 2014, for example, in England and Wales, there were 247,372 heterosexual weddings, and 4,850 same-sex marriages. Already there are several hundred same-sex divorces each year.

Once the novelty has worn off, I suspect the numbers of same-sex unions will decrease, just as heterosexual ones are doing. The point – that the old ways are dead and gone – will have been made, and the campaigners will move on to something else.

I once thought the same about the transgender issue. But the idea that people are whatever sex they think they are is a terrifying weapon in the hands of modern Thought Police. Whatever you say, you cannot possibly be right about this.

Express any opinion (apart from total submission), and within minutes you will be besieged by condemnation. It will be cleverly based on the idea that you are somehow being cruel to some troubled person, even though you aren't doing this at all.

But that is just a pretext. In reality, a whole moral and social system is being destroyed, and traditional ideas of male and female are the next target, now that husbands and marriage have been done away with. For once you begin down the road of sexual revolution, there's no end. There will always be someone more militant than you.

Since the French Revolutionaries set up the guillotine, the same thing has been true. Revolutions are all based on the false idea that humans and their nature can be changed.

And once changed, they will fit neatly into the Utopia that is planned for them. Utopia, as we find every so often in Russia, China and Cambodia, can only be approached across a sea of blood, and you never actually arrive.

The opposite view (now very unfashionable) is that we are all made in the image of God and cannot be changed into something else. This sounds odd to most modern ears. But in fact it is the foundation for the absolute respect for human life and liberty which underpins civilisation. Once it's gone, you can make excuses for anything in the name of some invented 'right'. Mass abortion is the obvious example.

And that is why The Mail on Sunday's exclusive story, that a teacher has been disciplined for failing to respect the transgender gospel, is so important. His slip was small, and momentary. One of his pupils, who would once have been called a girl, has decided to be male. He called this person a girl. So he must suffer.

In the vanished world of absolute truth, the student's sex would not be a matter of opinion. People might (and I would favour this) treat the person's view of their sex with sympathy and try to go along with it. Who would want to hurt somebody on a matter of such delicacy?

But in the new revolutionary world, truth is what the revolution says it is. This works in many ways.

A Left-wing newspaper recently claimed I had said something I had not said, and do not think. Shown irrefutable evidence that I had not used the words alleged, it continued to claim that I had used them, because that is what it thought I had said.

This leads down a very dark staircase. Reality must increasingly be forced to fit the beliefs of the new elite. Teachers must be punished for speaking the truth, so schools are no longer places where truth is respected or dissent allowed – which means they are dead to all intents and purposes.

And perhaps most grievous of all, teenagers are placed on a medical conveyor belt which leads to powerful body-changing drugs and possibly to surgical alteration.

It is not just crabbed reactionaries such as me who fret about this. In an eloquent article in The Times, the far-from-conservative commentator Janice Turner recently warned: 'But in a decade, when our adult children turn to ask, 'Why did you let me do this? Why didn't you stop me?' we may wonder if this was progress or child abuse.'

The answer to the question 'Why didn't you stop me?' will be even sadder.

We are failing to stop this because we are afraid of the intolerant revolutionary mob, which would lock up dissenters if it could, but for the moment contents itself with Twitter storms and witch-hunts.

I can't laugh this off. It is not just a wind-up. It is a threat to free thought and, after many months of staying silent about it, I feel I have to say so.

That faint rumble you can hear is the mob assembling for another heresy hunt.

An image that tells you all you need to know about duty

The sight of the Queen and Prince Philip watching the Remembrance ceremony last Sunday was almost unbearably poignant for me and (I suspect) many of my generation.

The Duke of Edinburgh was plainly straining every nerve and sinew to do honour to the fellow warriors he actually knew and fought alongside so long ago, despite the burden of his great age. Nothing on Earth was going to stop him doing that. There are so few left from that time. The Queen, with an almost equal effort of will, was yielding one of her most important duties to her successor, a very hard duty indeed.

They are now both so far ahead of us in years that they already seem to be in another time altogether, almost beyond our reach. It is disquieting and upsetting to see these things, inevitable as they are. I feel a great sense of foreboding.

The Prime Minister rattled her plastic sabre at the Russians

Last Monday the Prime Minister rattled her plastic sabre at the Russians, in a silly speech at the Mansion House. She doesn't even know what she's talking about. She said: 'Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea was the first time since the Second World War that one sovereign nation has forcibly taken territory from another in Europe.' This is wrong. Nato Turkey (now an increasingly nasty despotism) seized Northern Cyprus in 1974 and still sits there, unpunished.

She claimed Russia had 'repeatedly violated the national airspace of several European countries'. I asked No 10 for details. Two days later, whimpering that the information was somehow secret, a spokesman could only admit 'Russia has not violated UK airspace'. So whose airspace had it 'repeatedly' violated? No answer. If it's true, the Russians must know, so why the secrecy? The Russian threat is a fake.

Antidote to The Death Of Stalin

At last there is an antidote to the foolish film The Death Of Stalin, which trivialises this monster and his crimes. It is Angus Macqueen's brilliant, harrowing documentary Gulag, which you can watch on the BBC iPlayer only until December 6.

See it above all for the astonishing film of the man-made hell called Norilsk, and the interview with a woman who explains exactly how Stalin robbed her of the ability to trust her fellow humans. But be warned: there are no jokes.

29 October 2017 1:07 AM

The point of Left-wing propaganda is to make us feel powerless. Garbage of all kinds is constantly stated as fact

We know it is tripe, but we can do nothing about it. By submitting to it, we are demoralised and weakened.

I learned this during years of visiting and living in Communist countries, where ludicrous banners and lying media proclaimed wicked falsehoods and dared you to protest.

The tiny few who did ended up being dismissed as officially crazy by shameless toadying psychiatrists, exiled or locked up in camps.

It was only when, gloriously, enough people found the courage to defy this that these regimes came to an end, often very rapidly.

But in our squelchy Leftist State, there seems to be no escape. The BBC increasingly functions as a sort of Thought Police.

Even its complaints system has been turned into an arm of conformist repression.

One of the articles of faith of the new despotism is that climate change is caused by human activity.

It has to be an article of faith because there is no objective testable proof that this is so, the normal requirement in science.

We are told instead that there is a ‘consensus’ or a ‘vast majority’ in favour of this belief.

But scientific questions are not decided by majorities. They are decided by hard experiments, repeatedly verified.

Precisely because it is a faith rather than a fact, a special intolerant fury is turned on any who publicly doubt it.

Here is an example. Last week, the BBC’s own ‘Executive Complaints Unit’ (ECU), with which I have had many dealings, condemned Radio 4’s Today programme. This is something I have been trying to get it to do for years.

I have many times battled my way through the futile outer defences of the Corporation’s complaints system. This was long ago outsourced to an outside contractor, Capita.

I get the strong impression that Capita is there solely to soak up the anger of viewers and listeners. I can get no straight answer from the BBC about whether complaints made to it are even passed directly to the programme-makers involved.

You have to persist mightily to get past this to reach the ECU, which most complainants never manage to do because they don’t even know it exists.

Today is an overrated, increasingly dull and badly biased programme which repeatedly gives a free run to propagandists for the decriminalisation of dangerous drugs, a cause mysteriously popular among BBC persons, among whom drug abuse is totally unknown.

Ill-informed presenters listen obediently to this bilge, and recently (for example) allowed a guest to broadcast the street prices for cocaine, which it is a crime to sell or buy, without rebuke or interruption.

It gives no matching publicity to opponents of this mad cause, who are lucky if they get on the air at all.

But the ECU somehow cannot see that this is a blatant breach of the BBC Charter and Agreement, which requires impartiality on issues of public controversy.

Contrast this with its righteous response when a listener complained that Lord Lawson, who had expressed doubts about the claims of the climate change lobby, was not properly challenged by the presenter involved.

In fact, this claim had some merit. Lord Lawson’s statements about global temperatures were open to challenge. I would not myself have made them.

But while my complaints about presenters’ failure to interrogate the claims of drug legalisers, or to be impartial on the issue, are repeatedly flatly rejected, this complaint was upheld and resulted in a formal apology.

This is straightforwardly unjust. Complaints against the BBC are only upheld when it is not Left- wing enough.

There are only two responses to this. One is fury, and the other is laughter. But is there any escape from the web of incessant lies in which we are now entangled?

Ronan Bennett, writer of the new TV drama Gunpowder, about the Guy Fawkes plot, said in October 2000 that he would not turn in the Omagh bombers to the Royal Ulster Constabulary, if he knew who they were.

This is a historical fact, unlike many of the events shown in the drama itself. And I hope it causes you to wonder a bit about who and what this programme is for.

I am one of the last few surviving Englishmen who was brought up as a Protestant patriot, to revere the first Queen Elizabeth as our greatest monarch and Sir Francis Drake as the saviour of his country against the Armada in 1588.

How fortunate we were, I thought then, and think now.

Oddly enough, I was taught this period of our history by a proud Roman Catholic, an excellent teacher whose lessons I still recall more than 55 years later. There was no hint of bigotry in those lessons. Why should there have been? We were told that the Queen’s Roman Catholic subjects were, by the standards of their times, treated generously. The problem (here’s another fact) was that Pope Pius V had instructed them all in a decree of 1570 (‘Regnans in Excelsis’) to engage in treason against Queen Elizabeth, whom the Pope denounced as a ‘servant of crime’. And his church then sent priests into the country to foment that treason, allied with ever-present threats of foreign invasion.

Most English Roman Catholics sensibly ignored this foolish foreign plotting. Those few who sheltered such priests were (quite reasonably, in my view) considered equivalent to those who today shelter the agents of Islamic State.

They were not burned to death for holding to their faith, as Protestants had been under the appalling and intolerant Queen Mary. The whole picture of the era in Gunpowder is wrong, including the fictional scene in which a woman is stripped naked before being crushed to death.

As for the graphic disembowelling of a captured priest, it is interesting that the BBC is ready to show this gruesome thing but remains reluctant to show the equally grisly truth about what happens in an abortion.

It is propaganda, which is why nearly all the major actors on the rebel side, such as Liv Tyler, are good-looking, and nearly all the main characters on the Protestant side are ugly or otherwise despicable.

I would love to know the process by which its interesting author came to be chosen.

I spent Tuesday evening haranguing a student gathering in a Liverpool street about the non-existent ‘war on drugs’. Luckily, it didn’t rain.

I hadn’t meant to do an open-air meeting, but it ended up outside mainly because I wasn’t allowed to use the university buildings (things weren’t helped when the owners of a hastily booked alternative venue didn’t turn up to unlock the door). I had refused to agree to outrageous conditions demanded by the university authorities, and common on British campuses.

The pretext for these rules is, of course, terrorism. It always is. But in my view they are a threat to liberty. For instance, I was told ‘speakers may be asked to provide written undertakings about the conduct of the event and the content of their speech’; and ‘speakers may be asked to provide an outline of their speech for approval prior to the event taking place’. Police could also be asked to attend and the identities of the audience might be checked.

What bothers me is that other speakers must be accepting these police-state conditions without a murmur.

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26 October 2017 2:23 PM

I spent an enjoyable Tuesday evening in Liverpool haranguing a modest crowd in the open air, something I don’t think I have done since about 1972, when I used occasionally to plead the Trotskyist case to indifferent passers-by on Saturday afternoons, near one of the city’s best fish-and-chip shops, in King’s Square, in York. Some pictures used to exist of these events (taken without my knowledge) but the prints I was kindly but anonymously sent a few years ago have gone missing in one of my many moves. I wonder if the negatives still exist. They emerged because Matthew Norman, who then ran the Guardian diary, was insisting (mistakenly) that I had worn a moustacheless Manfred Mann beard in my Bolshevik days. The truth (revealed on the right in a 1969 picture) was that I sported sidewhiskers like hairy caterpillars, a style then reasonably common. But not a beard. That came later, and it was a full set on both occasions.

But I digress. I was speaking in the open air on Tuesday night for two reasons. This story from the Liverpool Echo (though it regrettably calls me a ‘Conservative’ and there was no soapbox, just a convenient bench) sets the scene

Also I did not speak continuously for 90 minutes, I am not Fidel Castro, but gave a short harangue and then took many questions from those present. It was a pleasant autumn evening in the fresh air, and I think it was much improved by the fact that the audience were alert and standing up (I work at a standing desk, and think it improves concentration and general health). Interestingly nobody coughed (as they do in multitudes in indoor meetings at this time of year), and the cough-sweets which I had brought with me to offer to offenders remained unused in my pocket.

The meeting was about drugs, and the non-existent war against them. But this was not the problem. The problem was that, to speak on University premises, I would have been obliged to agree to the provisions in these documents

Section 6 in the first of these contains such provisions as : ‘If the event involves an external speaker, then an initial internet search should be conducted to identify whether there are any initial concerns about the speaker….If such concerns are identified then a full risk assessment should take place.’

The excuse or pretext given for this is (of course) the prevention of terrorism, the excuse or pretext for a general assault on English liberty now well under way, and an inadequate and mistaken one in my view , since the longstanding laws against incitement to violence are compatible with free speech and are quite clear as it is) but look at this: ‘If the initial assessment identifies that there may be a possibility of people being drawn into terrorism or of hate speech or serious public disorder or any other factor which causes concern, a panel meeting will be required to discuss the risk assessment.’

This, particularly the wording ‘or any other factor which causes concern’, seems to me (like most such provisions) to have the characteristics of a catch-all which in a slightly different climate (or even this one) could be used to ban a speaker whose views were not approved of for very different reasons.

As for this below (emphases mine) it doesn’t seem to me to be compatible with the concept of free speech at all. :

‘p) The risk assessment will consider measures to reduce any risks associated with the event; this may include requirements such as that: i) admission tickets be issued; ii) there be provision for checking the numbers and/or identity of all those attending the meeting; iii) individuals be named as chairpersons for the meeting or activity; 8 iv) speakers may be asked to provide written undertakings about the conduct of the event and the content of their speech; v) speakers may be asked to provide an outline of their speech for approval prior to the event taking place; vi) a specified number of stewards or porters be available, at the expense of whomsoever the Deputy Vice-Chancellor or his/her appointed officer deems appropriate; vii) the local police be informed of the meeting or activity, and, if appropriate, be invited to attend; viii) any charges levied by the local police be met by the organising body; ix) a written explanation be given concerning the proposed conduct of the meeting or activity; x) particular arrangements be made to comply with fire or other safety arrangements; xi) payment in advance be required to cover hire charges and other reasonable contingencies; xii) full details of the planned movements of speakers (time of arrival and departure, names of those accompanying the speaker) be made available as soon as known and any changes of arrangements be notified promptly.’

Well, I had met similar things once or twice before in dealings with student societies at some London universities, and told the organisers I could not agree to them. I had expected those organisers to respond by suggesting holding the meeting on premises where such rules didn’t apply. But no such luck.

Tom Willett, who had invited me to Liverpool, was made of tougher stuff. He risked his own money by acting as a private individual and hiring a hall which was not on University territory. And that is where the meeting would have happened, except that whoever was supposed to unlock the hall on the evening failed to turn up in time.

Well, Tom is a man of spirit, and this was Liverpool, and it wasn’t actually raining, so the response seemed obvious. I suggested that we went ahead anyway, in the open air. There was a nearby space where it seemed to me we would be disturbing nobody and obstructing nobody, so we just went ahead. And so we did, and pretty successful it was too, good, sharp, robust debate, everyone a bit too cold and uncomfortable to be boring and long-winded, but not so cold and uncomfortable asa to be driven away by cold and misery. I think the whole audience remained to the very end(with perhaps one exception).

And it was also a small declaration, on that windy hilltop, that the spirit of liberty isn’t dead in this country. My thanks to all who came and stayed. It was a privilege to be there.